Friday, June 24, 2005

A reminder - Blair admits mass graves claims "untrue"

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of the people buried in those mass graves died as a result of the Iraq-Iran war, one example of such a report is this from IRIN:

“Both of my brothers who were Shi'ite activists in the 1991 uprising and my father who hadn’t participated in the uprising were killed and buried somewhere in an undisclosed location," he told IRIN in Baghdad. Hussein didn’t find either of the bodies of his family but he has now vowed to help others in his situation and joined the Society for the Preservation of Mass Graves.
Rafid al-Husseini, President of the Society, who is a surgeon at Baghdad hospital, was searching for his two cousins who were killed in the 1980s during the war with Iran at the same place, Hilla. Rafid said that many of the people killed and buried randomly by the Iraqi security were during the Iraq-Iran war, and after the 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims.